"The beauty of The Chef's Garden system is that they have made food safety a science. It has become a priority at the farm. It's part of their DNA," says Dr. Karl Kolb, president and CEO of The High Sierra Group and the farm's food safety consultant.

Food safety considerations factor into everything we do at The Chef’s Garden. From the moment a seed is planted in our fertile soil to the time a product is shipped, innovative techniques are implemented to ensure that the highest standard of food safety protocols have been realized.

Our cutting edge traceability system, intensive farm food safety training program, dedicated staff devoted to carrying out our food safety initiatives, and involvement of everyone on the farm to ensure a comprehensive involvement in the process ensures The Chef’s Garden uncompromising commitment to providing its customers with the safest specialty vegetables, microgreens, lettuces, herbs and edible flowers in the industry.

The Chef’s Garden has been actively and enthusiastically implementing exhaustive farm food safety initiatives since its inception. Bob Jones, Jr., who oversees every facet of vegetable production at The Chef’s Garden, sits on the board of The Ohio Produce Marketing Department and also works collaboratively on food safety research projects with the Ohio Department of Agriculture and Ohio State University to ensure that everything produced at the farm meets the highest food safety protocols existing in the industry.

In order to do so, Bob Jones, Jr. leads a Food Safety Team on the farm to identify and implement Good Agricultural Practices (GAPs) in the field and greenhouses and Good Manufacturing Practices (GMPs) in the packaging and distribution areas of the farm. The Chef’s Garden has also introduced more than one dozen procedures to perpetually review the safety of its products on a daily basis. These include a HACCP (Hazard Analysis Critical Control Points plan), metal detection of all outgoing products, documentation of packing room temperatures and pre-harvest testing for various foodborne illness organisms. As further assurance that the farm’s products are vetted through the most comprehensive food safety protocols in the world, its trace-back system records and tracks every single one of its products from seed to customer.